Not Safe for Work

A common internet warning, usually denoting a picture or video that you wouldn't want to show up when you are surfing the web at work. It's one thing to just look up the latest news or check your email. It's another to be looking at porn. Anything with nudity in it at all will usually often get labeled thus, on the off chance that a passing observer simply thinks you might be looking at porn.

So called because if you are caught reading a page that is Not Safe for Work at work, you can get fired. For the more graphic NSFW pages, even having them in the hard drive or cache of a work computer can get you fired. Even showing up in the server log files could be unhealthy.

Also applies to school, of course. Usually even being caught simply going to sites like YouTube or Facebook can get you in pretty big trouble there; being caught looking at anything "pornographic" will guarantee a trip to the vice principal's office, plus several detentions, or a suspension, or something similar.

Also particularly helpful to parents who are at home - believe it or not, some people on the Internet do have small children and still find time to netsurf. These same people like to have a warning to wait until the children are in another room before clicking a link.

NSFW can be applied to vulgar or violent, as well as pornographic, content. Also applied as a near-synonym for Squick. It may also be applied if the link requires sound, as not a lot of people have headphones at work (or should be wearing headphones, depending on the job).

Just in case you are still not clear on what this means, go to this page when you have privacy. Then ask yourself, do you really want your boss in the room when you're looking at that stuff?

Not quite on topic, but George Macdonald Fraser's novel The Pyrates mentions a three-tier rating system upper class British girls had for upper class British boys (apparently referring to danger to one's virginity) that included, in ascending order of peril, Not Safe At Vauxhall, Not Safe In Sedan Chairs and Not Safe Anywhere.

SFW: Safe For Work. Generally used to inform the web user who may be wary about clicking on a link that it is safe.

The website "How F***ed is the T?", which uses live data to determine average subway wait time, has a "SFW version" called "How's the T?", where descriptions such as "The Red Line isn't very f***ed" are changed to "The Red Line looks just fine".